The Ruling Sea by Robert V S Redick Page A

translucent. It was an ixchel arrow, two inches long—fashioned, as she had told them earlier, from the quill of a porcupine.
    “Who will say what must be said?” she asked.
    “That had better be Hercól,” said Pazel.
    “No,” said Hercól. “You were there when she fell, Pazel, and yours was the last face she saw as her eyes dimmed. The task is yours.”
    Pazel took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “But I’d feel better if a doctor were here. I’d even settle for crazy old Rain.”
    “Kneel,” said Diadrelu.
    Reluctantly, Pazel obeyed. He put his face close to Thasha’s own. It was only then that he realized how truly frightened he was. Thasha’s eyes looked withered. The lips he had kissed the night before were flecked with dirt.
    Diadrelu reversed her grip on the arrow—and with the whole force of her arm plunged it into a vein in Thasha’s neck.
    Her eyes flew open. And Pazel began to talk as fast as he could. Don’t shout don’t shout Thasha you’re safe you’re with us you’re with me Thasha trust me don’t shout .
    She did not shout. She leaped away from him in terror, nearly crushing Diadrelu beneath her and striking the window so hard that a crack appeared in the nearest pane. When Pazel tried to steady her she kicked him savagely away.
    “Peace!” hissed Hercól. “By the Night Gods, Thasha Isiq, I may have trained you too well! Your pardon, Lady Diadrelu, and you too, Pazel! Enough, lass, take a breath.”
    Pazel picked himself up, relief breaking over him in waves. She was awake, alive—and free of Arunis’ trap. It had all gone according to plan.
    Or had it? Thasha’s eyes were strange, savage. At last she appeared to recognize their faces, but would let no one comfort her. She shivered as though from deadly cold.
    “It worked,” said Neeps softly. “You were perfect, Thasha.”
    Thasha raised a hand to her throat. Her voice was a dry, pained whisper.
    “We fooled Arunis?”
    “We fooled them all,” said Hercól. “You did not marry, and Ott’s false prophecy cannot come true.”
    He spread a blanket over her legs. Thasha looked out at the sunny bay. Looking at her, Pazel thought suddenly of a group of sailors he had glimpsed long ago: hurricane survivors, coaxing a ruined ship into Ormaelport, their faces ravaged by memories of wild fear.
    “I touched ice,” Thasha whispered. “I was in a dark place all crowded with people, but there was no light, and then I began to see without light and the people were hideous, they didn’t have faces, and that old priest was there waving his scepter, and there was ice under my wedding shoes, and black trees with little fingerbone-branches that grabbed at me, and there were eyes in the slits of the trees and voices from holes in the ground. I was freezing. I could feel you holding me, Pazel; I could even feel the scar on your hand. But then the feeling stopped. And then everything began to vanish in the dark—the monster-people went out like candles, one by one. And the voices faded, until there was just one strange voice calling my name, over and over, like something that would never stop, like water dripping in a cave forever. But there was no water, no walls, there was nothing but ice, ice under my skin, ice in my stomach and my brain.”
    She hugged herself, looking slowly from one face to another.
    “Was I dead?”
    “No,” said Diadrelu, “but you were as close to death as a human can be, and return unharmed. Blanë means ‘foolsdeath,’ but not because it deceives only fools. The name means rather that the specter of death himself should not know the difference, if he came upon one in the grip of the drug.”
    “And brandy on top of that,” Neeps sighed.
    “Did old Druffle go through something like this when you and Taliktrum drugged him?” Pazel asked.
    The ixchel woman shook her head. “There are several forms of blanë , for various uses. We only needed Druffle to sleep. But when Thasha drove that quill